Rusalka

CHAPTER 14

SHE HOUSE had smelled of fresh laundry and herbs and baking all day—a curiously disturbing smell, Pyetr decided: not at all like the spirituous odors of the inns in which he had cheerfully misspent his years, smells compounded of smoke and horse and onions and wash water and the god knew what else; or the musty oil-and-wax smell of the homes of the wealthy, to which he had all his life aspired. Eveshka’s assault on the senses set a man to thinking about home, whatever that was, about modest little houses and cozy firesides with bread baking.

Which was foolish, Pyetr thought, because he could not for the life of him recall any such place in his entire life, except The Doe’s kitchen on holidays: that was the closest Ilya Kochevikov’s son had ever come to domesticity—nipping cakes off the table and catching a cuff of mistress Katya’s well-floured hand—

And here he was, sitting down to dinner, clean-shaven, smelling of soap, splendid in a fine white shirt and clean trousers, beside an uncommonly combed and curried Sasha Misurov, and—god witness—Ilya Uulamets with his hair and beard washed crackling white and not a trace of dirt under his fingernails.

Eveshka, her hair plaited with rose and blue ribbons, ladled out their supper into the waiting bowls, sat down at a tableful of waiting men and took up her spoon with a grace that made a man only hope not to spill anything on his shirt.

Every move she made was like that, every glance of her eyes, every soft, cheerful word. She prattled about the cleaning and the state of the stores and sweetly chided her father for his housekeeping—

Pyetr bit the inside of his lip, hard, and thought about getting up, getting the jug, creating a little noisy levity in the evening, but the hush around the table was too deep, and Eveshka’s gracious hospitality too genteel to offend.

He wanted something to break the spell. He avoided Eveshka’s eyes and tried to find fault with her gentle voice and her laughter, which went straight for the soft spots in a man. He even reminded himself where his sword was, beside him and against the wall; and reminded himself Sasha and Uulamets both had said once, on a saner day, that they should never let her get into the house.

He wanted the boards to creak and the domovoi to manifest itself in the cellar, even for the black ill-tempered ball of fur to show up—Pyetr Ilitch Kochevikov sat there wishing as hard as he had ever wished in his life, in the hope that Sasha was doing the same thing, and in the remote, slightly foolish reckoning that a gambler’s luck might be worth something—Sasha swearing that he had none of his own.

But there was no groaning of the house timbers, there was no scratching at the door.

Maybe, he thought of a sudden, it was all due to the fever Sasha swore he had had. Maybe he had never gone into a cave with a vodyanoi. Maybe the girl across the table had never died, and all the rest of it had never happened, and he had only come back to his senses this evening, still a little muddled after fever from his wound. Thoughts like that kept troubling him, complete turnabouts of reason, utterly persuasive if a man did not keep careful hold of what he had seen and had done—improbable as it was.

And two or three times during supper, when he was most tempted to distrust his memory, he took deliberate hold of his sanity and recollected that watery cave in some detail, remembered the skull and the bones and tried to keep from falling under Eveshka’s spell—for spell it surely was, if there were spells at all. He told himself that. Or he clung to the belief that he believed it, which might of course mean that he was mad.

“Tell me,” Eveshka said to him softly, leaning toward him, “how many people are there in Vojvoda?”

He had never counted. He reckoned, distractedly—perhaps five thousand. Ten.

Then with a sudden clutch of fear he thought about the forest, with only one tree left alive.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure.”

Eveshka was looking at him. Everything seemed to have stopped. The silence was unbearable and unbreakable.

“I’ve never been beyond this woods,” Eveshka said in that silken soft voice. “My mother used to say I could imagine better than was really true. So I imagine hundreds of houses, all with carved gables and painted shutters. Is Vojvoda like that?”

“There are houses like that.”

“And people coming and going all the time…”

“Farms and shops,” he said, trying to make it all ordinary and uninteresting. “Like any town.”

“Traders used to come here,” she said. “In my mother’s time. My mother—”

A shadow fell on Eveshka suddenly. Pyetr started and looked over his shoulder in the conviction there, was something suddenly behind him, and Sasha turned in the same breath.

But nothing was between them and the fire.

“I’m sorry,” he began to say, turning about again, his heart still beating hard. But Uulamets was holding Eveshka’s hand, and that shadow persisted, deeper than the ones he and Sasha cast on them both, deeper than the one in which Uulamets’ hand existed, holding hers.

“Papa—” she said, her voice trembling. “Papa, hold on to me…”

Pyetr held his breath, with the thought that he ought somehow to do something—lay hands on her, get from between her and the fire—and he did not know what to do—or dare to do anything. But the shadow seemed less after a moment or two.

“Papa,” Eveshka whispered, staring nowhere at all, “I don’t want to be dead. Please don’t let me go.”

“I’m not letting go,” Uulamets said. And sharply: “Eveshka!”

She drew a breath and the shadow passed entirely. Her free hand fluttered toward Uulamets’ sleeve. She touched it as a blind girl might, and said, “Papa? He wants me back.”

“Who?”

Eveshka’s breath caught. She shook her head violently and looked toward the corner.

Toward the river.

Pyetr very carefully eased his leg around the edge of the bench and began to get up, reaching for his sword.

“Don’t go out there,” Uulamets said.

Pyetr stood up and looked at them and at Sasha, who was getting quietly to his feet too.

“We drove him off once,” Pyetr said. He wanted to believe it would work twice, that the vodyanoi truly disliked swords; and that the Thing had no power over the girl who was sitting in their midst. “You said day or night makes no difference.”

“Tb most things!” Uulamets said. “Don’t open that door.”

“Master Uulamets,” Sasha said very quietly, “—where’s Babi?”

Uulamets did not answer for a moment. Then he said, “Good question.” He carefully got up from the bench, holding Eveshka by the shoulders. “But let’s think of what we don’t want here, shall we? Let’s all think about that—very hard.”

Pyetr did, most earnestly. He thought about the River-thing going back down its hole with Babi the furball in close pursuit. He wished the sun would find the vodyanoi in the morning and shrivel it. He hated it with all his might. And felt Sasha’s hand close hard on his arm.

“Wish us safe” Sasha said.

Then he remembered Sasha had warned him about wishes going further than one wanted, especially a wish for harm.

But in the same moment the fear just fell apart, leaving him wondering what had just happened to him, and inclined to think nothing had happened at all—

Except there was still Eveshka with them, a pale and frightened Eveshka, still holding to her father’s hand.

“It’s all right,” Uulamets said finally. “It’s all right. It’s given up.”

Pyetr truly wanted someone to explain matters to him. He stood there with the sword hilt like something foreign and somewhat foolish in his hand and with the constant feeling that any moment now the world would shake itself back into recognizable rules.

But he had been living that way for days.

“What are we going to do about it?” he asked.

No one paid any attention to him. Uulamets patted Eveshka on the shoulder and said to her, “Don’t worry. It won’t get in here.” Sasha for his part looked less than reassured.

So was Pyetr. Trusting to vulnerable windows and a none-so-stout door did not seem a reasonable plan of action.

So he asked, more loudly, “What are we going to do about it?”

Evidently no one knew.

“God,” he said in disgust, and slung his sword belt on, intending not to be parted from it even a step across the room hereafter—two wizards and a ghost being evidently incapable of any better defense. He took a cup from the shelf, the jug from under the table, and poured himself a modest drink—he had no intention of sleeping soundly tonight, either, or hereafter, for that matter—having no wish to wake with some nightmare laying hands on him, or coils, or whatever the case might be.

The old man had gone soft-headed over his daughter, or his entire attention was taken up with keeping his daughter from going back to bones, the god only knew. Pyetr took his cup and went over to the fireside where it was warm, sitting on Eveshka’s cot while Sasha took to clearing away the dishes and the old man sat and talked to his daughter.

Snatches of their low voices came to him—Eveshka’s fear of the vodyanoi, Uulamets’ assurances they could deal with it—

They, Pyetr thought disgustedly—they. They, with his sword and his going down into dark places, which he had no intention whatsoever of doing twice.

Then Eveshka said something that made him strain his ears and stop in mid-sip. She said, “Papa, I lied: I was running away. The vodyanoi—I think he made everything go wrong. Mama, and Kavi, and everything—I think he made her hate me…”

“A lie. It was the woods your mother hated. She came from the east. She stayed a season. Her folk came back and she went away, that’s all. She wanted nothing of mine and nothing of this place.” Here, in Pyetr’s troubled glance, Uulamets hugged his daughter’s head against his shoulder, pale gold against snowy white.

How old was he? Pyetr wondered.

Uulamets said to his daughter:

“Don’t mourn might-have-beens. Magic can’t work backwards, only forward. I taught you better than that.”

“I remember.” Eveshka’s faint voice tugged at Pyetr’s heart, made him regret doubting her and made him wish he could in fact do something—something quite practical, like proposing they all go down to the boat in the morning and set out to Kiev, where things were surely much more reasonable.

But maybe in a place where things were much more reasonable Eveshka would not even be alive.

“Pyetr,” Uulamets said suddenly, and Pyetr looked up, but Uulamets only wanted him to give Eveshka her cot back. He got up, and gave a little bow and said, confidently, because she looked so frightened, “We dealt with it once. It won’t get in.”

Eveshka gave him a sidelong anxious glance, as if she was not certain he was not a threat himself, then sat down on her cot by the fire, turned her back and began to unfasten her belt and her boots—which Pyetr watched in somber fascination until Uulamets took him by the sleeve and drew him and Sasha over into the corner.

“We have to catch the creature,” Uulamets said in a low voice. “We have to constrain it.”

“How?” Pyetr asked, and drew a breath. “If you have any notion of me going back in that damned cave, old man—”

“Be still!” Uulamets gripped his arm and shook it. “Listen to me. I’ve no strength tonight to suffer fools.”

“Listen yourself, grandfather…”

“Collect your alcohol-soaked wits. That creature has a hold on her.”

Pyetr had his mouth open to argue; he slid a glance toward Eveshka, whose slender shape showed, firelit through cloth—

“I want you to go outside just before dawn,” Uulamets said. “Walk down to the river—taking something of hers with you. That’s all you have to do.”

“All I have to do.” Pyetr started to suggest Uulamets could do it himself, but Uulamets said, clamping down hard on his arm,

“Failing which—I give nothing for any of our lives, do you understand me? I will not sleep tonight, but I can hold out only so long. Pay attention!” Uulamets said as he opened his mouth a third time, and the grip was all but painful. “You will go out at that hour, you will take the things I give you—you will do exactly as I tell you. Both of you.”

Chasing after the vodyanoi when it was on the retreat at the knoll was one thing; stalking it on its own terms was quite another. He truly wanted to say no.

But if they lost Uulamets, he admitted to himself, he did not trust the sword that much, and, unhappily, there seemed no way for an old man, a boy, and a ghost to do much against a thing like that, either, without the sword and some fool to use it.

“Well,” he said, and scratched a prickling feeling at the nape of his neck when Uulamets had told him the simple details, “lead it up to the porch. How fast is it?”

“Very,” Uulamets said. “I wish I could tell you that exactly.”

“You’re sure it won’t cross your line.”

“It shouldn’t,” Uulamets said.

So they all went out onto the porch at the first of the dawn, himself and Sasha and Uulamets and Eveshka, Sasha with one of Uulamets’ precious pots in hand and his own instructions, namely to stay step for step with him down the walk-up, then to duck down underneath immediately as they reached the bottom and stay there.

“Just stay out of my way when I come back,” Pyetr said to Sasha as they reached that point. “I’ll be coming fast.”

He earnestly hoped so, at least, as he made the lonely walk across the yard to the dead trees and the beginning of the path they took down to the river for water. The river, Uulamets said, was the best place to attract the thing.

Certainly, Pyetr thought.

A nocturnal creature like the vodyanoi was a little dim-sighted, Uulamets had said, where it regarded things unmagical; and therefore the small bracelet Pyetr wore about his right wrist, braided from a lock of Eveshka’s hair, would shine like a lamp, Uulamets swore, so far as the vodyanoi was concerned—

Uulamets said walk slowly down to the river.

Uulamets said dip the bracelet into the water and be on his guard.

God, it was dark down there.

Sasha shivered in his hiding place, his knees going numb against the ground, while he peered out into the dark and waited.

And waited, what seemed an ungodly long time.

Pyetr would be coming fast when he came up the hill, that was the plan: attract the thing right up onto the porch, which was the highest point they could lure it; and right there, right beyond the fence and across the road, was the gap in the trees where the first rim of the sun always showed and always cast its first light on the house.

Master Uulamets had the end and the sides of the walkway up to the porch secured with a dusting of salt and sulphur; and his own post was here, with another jar of the same, when Pyetr should come racing up that walkway with the creature in pursuit.

His own job was to dash out then and draw one line with the salt and sulphur to seal the trap.

That was the plan.

But he very much wished, as he sat shivering in his hiding-place, that Uulamets had set his trap a little closer to the river, and he hoped that Pyetr would not take any chances.

There was a sudden, a clearly audible splash. He heard Pyetr yell.

And nothing else.